Heimhenge wrote:All conifers sucked. I believe the best odds were with some type of ash.

Wow, not ever-vertical, fairly narrow birch?

Been awhile, but I think birch [edit from beech] was also up there. Thing is, we're talking about hitting through a tree ... not between them. Narrow?

OH. I thought you meant like through a generalized region of trees that intersected the course or shot. Hitting through a treed zone as opposed to hitting through the branchington region of of single tree. 'Made me think that the narrow nature of birch trunks would make balls intersect them less.

"That big tube down the side was officially called a "systems tunnel", which is aerospace contractor speak for "big tube down the side."

Heimhenge wrote:I've had that physics monologue. When I was a young kid I distinctly recall the first time my uncle gave me some magnets to play with, and how amazed I was that they affected each other w/o actually touching. Some time during my physics education it dawned on me that gravity does the same thing, even though I'd taken that for granted for a long time. Not like it really changed anything conceptually for me, but it somehow made gravity equally amazing and mysterious.

Magnets are weirder because the forces aren't even close to linear which is what we are used to. (Now, before everyone flames me about gravity being 1/r^2, it is nearly constant in day-to-day life here on the surface and constant is linear.)

True story - Boehringer Ingelheim has a large office near me which I've had occasion to be in. The hallways are along the outside, and the offices are along the inside of the building, and the hallways are lined with windows so that everyone walking around can enjoy the view of the gorgeous campus. The windows are in two parts - top and bottom, with a sash in the middle, which hits right at horizon level.

I'm somewhat irritated that "plants get their biomass through photosynthesis" is considered to be this field-specific botany knowledge. Not only because "sourced from x = made of x" is incredibly flimsy logic, but because it fails to follow that flimsy logic to the entertaining conclusion. Plants are the main primary producers in any food chain (and where it's not plants, it's photosynthetic algae or the like), so any carbon atom we eat was in a plant far more recently than it was in the air. That is, if "trees are made of air", then "ALL higher life is made of air".

Hekateras wrote:I'm somewhat irritated that "plants get their biomass through photosynthesis" is considered to be this field-specific botany knowledge.

Yes, "made of" does not mean the same as "made from", but the comic doesn't appear to be saying "this is some secret knowledge that only people in this field have" but rather "this is something that people in this field are much more likely to spend time musing about". People are aware that plants are made from air, but they don't think about it, let alone how strange it might be.

WriteBrainedJR wrote:The combination of these two things is especially crazy. A huge field of trees can be more clearly the same organism than parts of the same individual tree?

A huge field of trees can be the same organism. Roots spread out horizontally, now and then another tree pops up from them. This is no more special than all the branches on a trunk being the same organism.

As for genetically distinct roots & leaves: Many plants accepts "transplantions" as long as it is the same species of plant. (Fruit farmers sometimes takes advantage of this.) In dense growing shrubbery, different plants grows through each other and fuses when the species match. Other species gets destroyed by incompatibility, so the dense-growing shrubbery wins out. Sometimes a root or a branch dies from overcrowding, end result is that some "individuals" may only have a root and some exists only above ground. And some individuals may be distributed, i.e. the middle section died after successfully establishing a new side root.